Question

I am writing some unit tests that are deliberately passing bad strings to the Java DOM XML parser.

E.g.

DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();

String message_xml = ""; // Empty string, not valid XML!!!
ByteArrayInputStream input = new ByteArrayInputStream(message_xml.getBytes());
Document doc = db.parse(input);

This is correctly throwing a SAXParseException (which is what my unit test expects). But it is also writing a message to System.err (stderr) in the Java console:

[Fatal Error] :1:1: Premature end of file.

Is there any way to configure the XML parser to NOT write to stderr?

I’m using Java 1.6SE.

Answer 1

Install your own ErrorHandler:

db.setErrorHandler(new ErrorHandler() {
    @Override
    public void warning(SAXParseException e) throws SAXException {
        ;
    }

    @Override
    public void fatalError(SAXParseException e) throws SAXException {
        throw e;
    }

    @Override
    public void error(SAXParseException e) throws SAXException {
        throw e;
    }
});